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OLPC's XO-1.75 Laptop To Have a Multitouch Screen
angry tapir writes "One Laptop Per Child has revealed it is adding a multitouch screen to the upcoming XO-1.75 laptop and is modifying software to take advantage of the new hardware. The XO-1.75 with a touch-sensitive 8.9-inch screen will start shipping next year. The laptop will run on an Arm processor and is the successor to the current XO-1.5 laptop, which runs on a Via x86 processor. OLPC will also add a multitouch screen on the next-generation XO-3 tablet, which is due to ship in 2012. Fedora will continue to be the base Linux distribution for XO-1.75 as the laptop changes from the x86 to Arm architecture."
Steve Jobs at one point offered to donate MacOSX licenses for every OLPC, and was turned down because the project's leadership at the time was dead set on free as in FSF software.
It'd be interesting to see if he'd do the same with iOS and all it's associated multitouch patents, but somehow I think that the OLPC project's visionary potential may have faded too far to attract such an offer again (even as their arrogance may have faded too far to reject such an offer again).
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
No, I learned that from living in America.
Last time, it was $400 to get one and give one, so for a "$100" device, that's "Buy 4, Get one, Give one, Donate the Rest to our Overheads".
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.